Become a Fan

July 17, 2010

In the past year, our family has gotten exposed to a different part of the country. My oldest son chose to attend school in the western part of North Carolia and it's given us a chance to see that area and get exposed to the local culture in and around Asheville. Last June, my son and I attended an outdoor rock concert set up under Interstate highway 540, a program known as Downtown After Five. The scene attracted a broad range of people, ranging in age from babies to octogenarians, but everybody seemed to be having a great time. I blogged about that experience in my post Downtown After Dark.

The highlight of that concert was the amazing musicianship of Randall Bramblett. At that show, Bramblett played very soulful tenor and soprano sax backing up blues guitarist Geoff Achison. I decided I needed to hear more of Bramblett's music. I looked him up on Google and discovered that he's a highly respected singer-songwriter, though he is not well known outside of the American South. I took a quick listen on Itunes to his latest album -- Now It's Tomorrow -- and decided to buy it. It's been a favorite album on my Ipod ever since. For some reason, the Itunes Genius feature picked out one particular song, Blue Road, and plays it more often than the others. Blue Road is the story of the narrator's up and down experiences with a woman named Ginnie Lee. Bramblett keeps saying he can't forget about her and wants to take her on the Blue Road.

I'm not exactly sure, but I have a hunch the Blue Road just might be referring to the Blue Ridge Parkway, a two lane road that winds through the mountains for hundreds of miles. On my last trip out of Asheville, my son and I followed a winding dirt road and eventually made it up the parkway. We'd planned ahead, so we brought along a picnic lunch and sat ourselves down at one of the first overlooks. The scene looked like this as we look over the shoulder of my son Jason:

We'd finally made it to the Blue Ridge Parkway and this first view just offered a taste of what lay ahead.

The Blue Ridge truly is a mountain road and follows a series of switchbacks which bring your car to higher and higher elevations. A little further up the road, the views were even more spectacular, as we could look down to see the clear green waters of a river threading it's way through the valley against a backdrop of the Blue Ridge mountains.

Writing in my journal at the time, I had the following impressions. A glassy lake cuts through between ridges -- edged by sandy shorelines, like a mustard outline of the flat waters. Above, curling humps and brazen points catch my eye. The more distant hills fade into overlays of blue. The scent of burning firewood wafts across to us from the visitor's center, while a flag flutters and bucks in the early May winds.

Here's a shot of Jason drawing the scene in his sketch book:

And that was just the beginning of what we saw that day. Just ahead, a mountain ridge and tunnel pointed the way forward.

Call it the Blue Road or the Blue Ridge Parkway, but this road offers views which quickly outstrip the adjectives one might apply to capture it. If you're in western North Carolina, you'll want to go out of your way and see for yourself the many views available from this roadway as it follows a twisting path through the mountains. Bring along a picnic lunch and take your time.

For me, the Blue Ridge Parkway and Randall Bramblett are examples of the fine differences available when we choose to explore new territories. In these places, we'll often find new geographic and cultural touch stones.

Have you been to the Blue Ridge Mountains? What were your reactions?

Have you experienced regional artists that have exposed you to different worldview?

It's summer and it's a fine time to stretch out, to find those new places and open yourself to novel influences.

July 15, 2010

Several years ago, I finished my first novel and began looking for a way to get it published.A few months into the process, I heard about a contest for novelists being held by Gather.com, a social network.I entered the contest by submitting my novel’s first chapter.By contest’s end, over 2500 entries had joined mine in the contest.

Many of the writers stayed on Gather to comment on entries and watch the final stages of the contest play out.Around this time, one of the other contest participants wrote an extended post expressing her frustration with the contest and all of the antics she’d seen to game the system.A like-minded group of writers joined in and we had a lively exchange on this particular Gather conversation “thread.” In addition to discussion about the pros and cons of the contest, we talked about writing and the various routes to publication.We were having fun with this, so she was cajoled to write a second post and the “Writin' Wombats” online writing group officially launched under her leadership.

What does this have to do with the new novel, Rock Paper Tiger, published by Soho Press?The woman who wrote that first thread on writing and formed the writing group was Lisa Brackmann and Rock Paper Tiger is her first published novel.I’ve just finished reading the book and have to say that Lisa has written a thriller that really delivers the goods.

Rock Paper Tiger begins in Beijing and we follow the first person account of Ellie (known to her Chinese friends as Yili), an American whose life is China is beginning to fall apart.The first thirty pages set the stage well.Ellie has an artist friend named Lao Zhang who lives in an out of the way suburb called Mati Village.She takes the subway to see him, but he’s acting strangely.Along the way, Ellie meets a few of Zhang’s acquaintances – lots of people like to hang around him.She also begins to hear that some foreigners in suits are looking for her.

Ellie takes us on a tour of the underside of Beijing as she moves around and it’s not always pretty.The book is set after the 2008 Olympics have taken place and the city is a mix of the glossy new and much else that is run down.Ellie loves Beijing, but is a foreigner and is never allowed to forget it.When the men in the suits start getting nasty and Lao Zhang decides to leave Beijing for a while, Ellie decides to hit the road and visits several other Chinese cities.

Interwoven within this story are flashbacks to Ellie’s experiences as a medic in Iraq, where she gets involved with a soldier named Trey and gets inadvertently pulled into treating prisoners who’ve been undergoing harsh interrogation.Eventually we learn how she and Trey ended up in China and the tale cycles forward.

Ellie is not always a likeable character, but she’s compelling and I found myself wanting to know what would happen to her even when it feels like every step she’s taking is the wrong one.Ellie moves from place to place but never manages to elude the “suits.” The tension mounts and leads toward an intense conclusion which draws together the threads of Ellie’s adventure in a satisfying way.

Rock Paper Tiger dips into aspects of today’s headlines about China, including ethnic tensions, the aftermath of earthquakes and the censorship of online information, but all of this fits in well within the thriller and Ellie’s quest to make sense out of her life.Brackmann puts the reader on the ground in China and we go way beyond the headlines and get a sense of what life in China is like -- both for the rising Chinese entrepreneurial class and for the many people who continue to live from day to day in lifestyles that haven’t changed for centuries.The book feels like an insider’s look at today’s China, but manages to pull this off in the context of a character driven novel and a thriller with lots of bumps and chills along the way.This is a fine novel and I recommend it to readers who enjoy thrillers, want to learn about today’s life in China or just want to read an offbeat, challenging novel written by a talented new writer.

July 02, 2010

In my online writing group, the Writing Wombats, we talk about various aspects of writing and sometimes get into chats about various aspects of craft and creativity.

In a recent thread, we discussed the topic of how your experiences show up in your writing. I'm currently writing my second novel and have written numerous short stories, so I've had lots of chances to play around with my basket of experiences and continue the exploration in my fiction.

I write what I know, but often veer into extrapolations that take my characters into situations where they make different choices than I would, which is a lot of the fun of it. I have traveled to a lot of different countries, cities and other locations, and like to use these locations in my writing. I also like to take an experience I have had and then do "what-ifs" to explore those roads not taken.

Engineers generally know that they can't reliably take data from one context and extrapolate to prove a totally different context; but for novelists, those context shifts are fair game as you build a world for your characters to play in.

My first novel, Growing Up Single, was set in locales which included New England, where I grew up, New York, Paris, the Riviera and several cities in Canada. The settings in my second novel are even more diverse and include stops in Asia, other parts of Europe and the Middle East. But a setting is just the beginning. It offers a canvas upon which a story can unfold.

If you are a writer, do you mostly rely on your own experiences to shape your fiction or is this foundation really more of a jumping off point to fuel stories that go beyond your experience?

If you are a reader, can you tell when the writer has really experienced the place or kinds of events that are depicted? Or would you prefer to be brought into a very different world that takes you away from those touch points with day to day life?